Web services for widespread user applications such as word processing, presentation, calendaring, and spreadsheets are becoming increasingly common. Users no longer need to deal with disadvantages of locally installed and executed applications such as having to update or reinstall the application each time an aspect of the application of the computing device changes, being tied to a single machine for processing their documents, and similar challenges.
User experience with web service applications—usually accessed through a browser's user interface—is typically somewhat different from the local application experience. Some of the reasons for this disparity include display capabilities of browsers differing from capabilities of actual application user interfaces, data having to be retrieved over network(s) vs. local data stores, and comparable reasons.
Spreadsheet applications enable users to process a variety of data types in tabular format, compute formulas, run analyses, create charts, and so on. A typical spreadsheet document may include a table of a relatively large number of rows and columns for the user to fill in. Thus, sizeable amounts of data may be involved with each spreadsheet document. Considering the data may change dynamically, retrieval and update of data for a spreadsheet web service may cause delays in display or interactivity and, thereby, degradation of user experience.